Monthly Archives: August 2018
Today in History – August 31
1422 – King Henry V of England dies of dysentery while in France. His son, Henry VI becomes King of England at the age of 9 months. At least the kid’s got the genes for it, unlike our previous ‘leader’, the progeny of a Kenyan layabout and a white pron-star wanna-be.
1535 – Pope Paul II deposed & excommunicated King Henry VIII over a question of annulment and divorce. Henry says “Feh! You want to run a church, run THAT church. I’m starting my own.” And the Church of England comes into being. Another memorable moment in history precipitated by the ongoing pursuit of the Great Bearded Clam.
1803 – Lewis and Clark start their expedition from Pittsburgh at 11 o clock in the morning. In 1803, Pittsburgh was pretty much the end of civilization. Many politicians in Washington still believe that today.
1886 – The 7.0 Mw Charleston earthquake affects southeastern South Carolina with a maximum Mercalli intensity of X (Extreme); 60 people killed with damage estimated at $5–6 million. People tend to forget that the West Coast isn’t the only part of the country subject to earthquakes.
1895 – German Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin patents his Navigable Balloon.
1914 – German General von Kluck decides not to attack Paris. Denies Paris a chance to meet future clientele, goes down in history as the German general who DIDN’T go to Paris. Parisian restaurateurs have to destroy all the menus they’d had printed up in German while Parisian brothel stocks plunge.
1920 – The first radio news program is broadcast by 8MK in Detroit, accused Donald trump of meeting with Vladimir Lenin.
1939 – Nazi Germany mounts a staged attack on Gleiwitz radio station, giving them an excuse to attack Poland the following day, starting World War II in Europe. Never let a crisis go to waste, and if you don’t have a convenient crisis, INVENT one.
1942 – In Ternopil, western Ukraine, at 4.30 am, German SS organize the first deportation of Jews from Ternopil ghetto to death camp in Belzec, about 5,000 Jews were deported to face death in Belzec. When the Germans captured Ternopil, about 18,000 Jews lived in the city. The horror of REAL Nazis is that 1939-1945 has dozens of sad dates like this where they loaded up entire populations and sent them off to death camps or to random pits in nearby fields and forests. This is what REAL Nazis did.
1954 – Hurricane Carol (1st major named storm) hits New England, 70 die. FEMA slow to react, Bush widely blamed.
1954 – US Census Bureau forms. In 2009, it is taken over by ACORN.
1971 – Dave Scott becomes first person to drive a car on the moon. That’d be AMERICAN astronaut Dave Scott… And an American car.
1997 – Diana, Princess of Wales and her ‘companion’ Dodi Al-Fayed and driver Henri Paul died as a result of a car crash in Paris. Hey! It’s a big deal to a lot of women…
1998 – North Korea reportedly launches Kwangmyongsong, its first satellite. The claim is widely assumed to be bullsh*t.
PETA-philes…
Or, as we say it “People Eating Tasty Animals“:
Dad used to run a couple of crab traps in the bayou behind the house. He’d catch a few each day, toss ’em in the crisper of an old fridge on the back porch. In the cool, they’d stay alive for a few days, during which he added the number until he reached the quantity Mom characterized as ‘a mess’ – enough to boil and shell for the meat. Mom stuffed everything short of Dad’s slippers with crabmeat stuffing.
Crabs were just one of many proteins we harvested from the bayous and marshes where I grew up. There were weeks when every meal besides breakfast was something we’d taken from the fields and marshes and bayous.
And that trap? That’s the hi-tech, production version of crabbing. You can drive down the roads in South Louisiana and see people crabbing with nothing more than a dip-net and lengths of string with chicken necks and backs tied to one end for bait. Just toss it in the water and wait. You’ll see the string straighten out when the crab finds a free meal and takes off with it. All you have to do is carefully pull him close enough to dip him up with the net and drop him in a waiting tub.
It’s kinda the way that the Democrat party keeps voters happy.
Food for Thought – 30 August 2018
Today in History – August 30
1146 – European leaders outlaw crossbows, intending to ending war for all time. Except for longbows, lances, pikes, battle flails, etc., etc., ad infinitum.
1836 – The city of Houston is founded by Augustus Chapman Allen and John Kirby Allen. “Houston” was a lot snappier-sounding than “mosquito-ridden, festering bayou”.
1918 – Fanni Kaplan shoots and seriously injures Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin. This, along with the assassination of Bolshevik senior official Moisei Uritsky days earlier, prompts the decree for Red Terror.
“To overcome of our enemies we must have our own socialist militarism. We must carry along with us 90 million out of the 100 million of Soviet Russia’s population. As for the rest, we have nothing to say to them. They must be annihilated.”“Do not look in the file of incriminating evidence to see whether or not the accused rose up against the Soviets with arms or words. Ask him instead to which class he belongs, what is his background, his education, his profession. These are the questions that will determine the fate of the accused. That is the meaning and essence of the Red Terror.”
And that’s how a handful of radicals gain control of a nation.
1939 – Isoroku Yamamoto appointed supreme commander of Japanese fleet. A couple of years later, he attacks Pearl Harbor.
1956 – Lake Pontchartrain Causeway opens. Longest continuous over-water bridge in the world. Unfortunately, one end is in New Orleans, making it roughly equivalent to a concrete enema pipe…
1979 – President Jimmy “I never met a despot I didn’t like” Carter attacked by a rabbit on a canoe trip in Plains Ga. This says a lot about the quality of this man’s presidency. I wholly expected Obama to be assaulted gerbils. “Armageddon!”
Food for Thought – 29 August 2018
Today in History – August 29
1786 – Shays’ Rebellion, an armed uprising of Massachusetts farmers, begins in response to high debt and tax burdens.
“I have been greatly abused, have been obliged to do more than my part in the war, been loaded with class rates, town rates, province rates, Continental rates and all rates … been pulled and hauled by sheriffs, constables and collectors, and had my cattle sold for less than they were worth … The great men are going to get all we have and I think it is time for us to rise and put a stop to it, and have no more courts, nor sheriffs, nor collectors nor lawyers.”
Plough Jogger
1793 – Slaves in French colony of Saint Domingue (Haiti) freed. The French Revolution comes to Haiti, decapitates the ruling French, and Haiti goes on to become a green jewel in the paradise of the Caribbean. Right?
1831 – Michael Faraday discovers electromagnetic induction. It’s powerful and mysterious and provides me with a neat career…
1885 – Gottlieb Daimler patents the world’s first motorcycle.
1910 – The Japan–Korea Treaty of 1910, also known as the Japan–Korea Annexation Treaty, becomes effective, officially starting the period of Japanese rule in Korea. It ends in 1945.
1914 – Arizonian is first vessel to arrive in San Francisco via Panama Canal instead of that months-long journey down and around the tip of South America.
1949 – Soviet atomic bomb project: The Soviet Union tests its first atomic bomb, known as First Lightning or Joe 1, at Semipalatinsk, Kazakhstan. On the same day in 1953, they pop their first hydrogen bomb.
1982 – 38 degrees F – lowest temperature ever recorded in Cleveland in August. Some of that ‘global warming’.
1991 – Supreme Soviet suspends all activities of the Soviet Communist Party. 2008 – Putin says he don’t need no stinkin’ party to be the dictator…
2005 – Hurricane Katrina devastates much of the U.S. Gulf Coast from Louisiana to the Florida Panhandle, killing more than 1,836 and causing over $115 billion in damage. What? It hit MORE than those poor people in New Orleans? Where’s mah FEMA check? 2017 Update: All those Katrinians we exported to Houston? Looks like we’ll get some back.
Food for Thought – 28 August 2018
Today in History – August 28
1565 – Oldest city in the US, St Augustine Florida, established. Immediately overrun by snowbirds…
1830 – The Tom Thumb presages the first railway service in the United States by racing a horse-drawn car. When a belt slipped off, killing the blower to the boiler, the horse won! Besides, all it takes to make a horse is two horses. It took an industrial revolution to make a locomotive.
1837 – Pharmacists John Lea & William Perrins manufacture Worcester Sauce. Life is good!
1859 – The Carrington event – a geomagnetic solar storm – disrupts electrical telegraph services and causes aurora to shine so brightly that they are seen clearly over the Earth’s middle latitudes. If it happened today the world would be in the dark.
1862 – American Civil War: Second Battle of Bull Run Battle of Second Manassas. The Confederacy won, but General Longstreet’s disobedience here made the victory smaller, and Longstreet later would cost us the Battle of Gettysburg.
1898 – Caleb Bradham’s beverage “Brad’s Drink” is renamed “Pepsi-Cola“.
1909 – A group of mid-level Greek Army officers launches the Goudi coup, seeking wide-ranging reforms. The civilization that gave us Aristotle and Pythagoras in antiquity can’t organize, in the words of an English friend, ‘a piss-up in a brewery’ today.
1962 – 22 inches (55.9 cm) rainfall at Hackberry, Louisiana (state record). Hackberry is about fifteen miles south of me.
1963 – Martin Luther King Jr’s “I have a dream” speech at Lincoln Memorial in front of a crowd of 200,000. Poor, poor deluded man. Who’s gonna believe that “they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character” nonsense? It was called March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, as contrasted by subsequent occasions of March for Free Shit.
1968 – Rioting takes place in Chicago during the Democratic National Convention, triggering a brutal police crackdown. Now, one candidate can blatantly STEAL the nomination from another candidate, attend her own coronation, and the sheep bleat happily all the way to the polls.
1981 – The National Centers for Disease Control announce a high incidence of Pneumocystis and Kaposi’s Sarcoma in gay men. Soon, these will be recognized as symptoms of an immune disorder, which will be called AIDS. At that point the spread can be prevented by sitting on your butt and keeping your mouth shut…
1998 – Second Congo War: Loyalist troops backed by Angolan and Zimbabwean forces repulse the RCD and Rwandan offensive on Kinshasa. Between this one and the First Congo War that started in 1996, somewhere between three and six million Africans are killed. Just Africa being Africa…
Food for Thought – 27 August 2018
Today in History – August 27
1859 – Petroleum discovered in Titusville, Pennsylvania. World’s first successful oil well. Several polar bears mysteriously drown.
1918 – Battle of Ambos Nogales: U.S. Army forces skirmish against Mexican Carrancistas and their German advisors in the only battle of World War I fought on American soil.
1928 – Kellogg-Briand Pact, outlawing war, signed by sixty nations. Ah, yes, the notable “signing a piece of paper will stop crazed lunatics with armies” ploy. WE all KNOW this one works…
1939 – First flight of the Heinkel He 178, the first modern jet aircraft. Nothing quite like the quest for military dominance to further science.
1945 – US troops land in Japan after Japanese surrender. That’d be Dad puttering around the anchorage in Tokyo Bay in a landing craft, playing taxi to the Allied fleet.
1985 – The Nigerian government is peacefully overthrown by Army Chief of Staff Major General Ibrahim Babangida. Politics as it is done in Africa. The Left wants similar actions here.
2003 – Mars makes its closest approach to Earth in nearly 60,000 years, passing approximately 34,646,416 miles (55,758,006 kilometers) from Earth. “Dude! Like, you could FEEL the breeze!”
2003 – The first six-party talks, involving South and North Korea, the United States, China, Japan and Russia, convene to find a peaceful resolution to the security concerns of the North Korean nuclear weapons program. Because negotiating with crazed dictators ALWAYS works.
Food for Thought – 26 August 2018
The Name Game #520
Eighty degrees at 8 AM when I walked out to get the paper this morning, with 85% humidity. We’re headed for the low nineties.
Opened the paper past the front page splash the John McCain had died. His last years as a ‘RINO’ were particularly destructive.
Opened the paper over a breakfast of Cajun boudin and eggs and found that the big hospital across the river reports thirty-six new babies from between August 10 and August 20. of those, half, eighteen, are to unwed parents and two new babies have mommies who didn’t get a name of their happy visitor.
Let’s get on with it.
Brandon & Amber G. tag a daughter with Huxleigh Jean so she’ll be unique like everybody else.
Isaac L. & Melissa L. (different surnames) bring a baby boy, Grayson Wendell. Whose son?
First punctuation on the lis shows up when De’Shawn(!!!) G. & Marketa(!) L. tag a little boy with De’Marquee Lei. Kid never stood a chance.Ronnie Jr. & Kelly B. get all outdoorsy with their son River Aug.ine. I’m not sure about that middle name, but that’s what’s in the paper. Maybe the world is moving past apostrophes.
Kiethlin & Crystal W. triple up on their son Keithen Joseph-Lee.
Richard & Tasha H. tag a son with Colt Thomas. wonder if they’ll name their daughter ‘Heifer’?
More punctuation finds a ‘forever home’ as Steven F. & Casme(!) J. name their daughter Sa’niya Rae. Note that these people do not adhere to the ‘Capitalize the next letter after the goofy-assed apostrophe’ rule. Nor do Daxonne(!) G. & Lydia W. with their son A’mar DeVaughn.
Miss Eyyona(!) F. follows the rule with her daughter Ira’Lynn Nolia-Bell but she misses the one that says ‘At least get the guy’s name’.
It’s always interesting to see how people handle twins. Charles H. & Courtney C. go with Cayden Deshawn and Zayden Hamilton.
Let’s run another apostrophe out the door as Brian S. Jr. & Briauna(!) J. show a daughter, little Bris’Lynn Nicole.
Demetree(!) L. & Tymecia(!) W. manage to NOT use punctuation on their daughter Tiana JaNae but they HAD to toss in an extraneous capital letter.
Nicholas C. & Devin C. (different surnames) tag their baby girl with Mynden Gray.
And that’s where we end up on this hot summer day. See you in a week.
Today in History – August 26
580 AD – An un-named Chinese invents toilet paper. There are earlier references but historians have nothing to go on…
1346 – Hundred Years’ War: The military supremacy of the English longbow over the French combination of crossbow and armored knights is established at the Battle of Crécy. Also involved the use of cannon, maybe for the first time in Europe. There is an ‘urban legend’ about an English term derived from this battle that involves the extended middle finger and the words “pluck yew” directed toward the French. The story is not true. The sentiment, however, is…
1789 – Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen approved by Constituent Assembly at Palace of Versailles. Then they went out into the city and made the streets run red with the blood of their decapitated opponents.
1862 – American Civil War: The Second Battle of Bull Run Manassas begins. It ends just like the first one, with a Union defeat.
1883 – Eruption of Mount Krakatoa. It lowers temperatures worldwide almost two degrees F. That’s the answer to global warming: Just pop a volcano every year or two…
1920 – The 19th amendment to United States Constitution takes effect, giving women the right to vote. Suddenly, physical attractiveness becomes a campaign issue.
1944 – World War II: Charles de Gaulle enters Paris on a road paved with American and Commonwealth blood This is an act somewhat like buying somebody GIVING you a car and you start acting like you’re Henry Ford. Three-quarters of a million Allied soldiers yawn and continue whipping German butt so the haughty Frenchman can act like he really did something… de Gaulle is making speeches and starring in parades while the real battles are being fought elsewhere. We needed the French like a fish needs a bicycle.
1946 – George Orwell published “Animal Farm”. Conservatives read it as a warning. Leftists see it as a textbook.
1966 – The Namibian War of Independence starts with the battle at Omugulugwombashe. As battles go, there was less bloodshed than a Chicago Saturday night.
1985 – French government claims no knowledge of assault on Rainbow Warrior, the Greenpeace protest vessel sunk in New Zealand on July 10. The French finally win a naval battle in the 20th Century, albeit it’s a bunch of whale-kissing hippies. You’d think they’d want to take credit…